Spring Searching

I had an hour until dusk to get there, but there was a “no trespassing” sign by the dirt road I was driving on.  I stopped the truck and thought about it for a minute.  I wasn’t looking for legal trouble.  I turned around.  But a hundred yards down the road I stopped again.  I really wanted to see if Craner Spring had water.  My Utah atlas showed only a thin strip of private land that I’d have to cross to get back onto public land, where the spring was.  I wouldn’t cause any harm.  I turned the truck back around and drove toward the sign.

When I reached the sign, I stopped.  The spring was probably going to be dry anyway – the creekbed coming out of the Lakeside Mountains was bone dry.  The US Magnesium plant was in clear view, and they might try to prosecute me for trespassing.  I turned around again and drove toward the main road.

I stopped once more.  Duke eyed me wearily.  The plant was a half mile away.  No vehicles had started my way yet.  I’d see them if they did.  And it was 6:00 – most of the folks at US Magnesium had probably gone home.  I turned around.  This time when I passed the trespassing sign, I stepped on the throttle.

I was just west of the Great Salt Lake, and the country was dry as chalk.  Earlier in the day I’d rolled down my windows while I drove across the flats.  A fine gray dust billowed into the cab of my truck, coating my dashboard and stinging my nose.  Alkali dust.  I rolled the windows up, but even now the dust coated the inside of the cab.  There was less dust here, but the country wasn’t any wetter.

I eased the truck up the dirt track toward Craner Spring.  My map placed Craner Spring at the center of the Lakeside Range at the head of Vindicator Canyon.  Gray rock walls squeezed the canyon floor.  Tan grass and gray rock covered the ground, interspersed only occasionally by drab sagebrush or juniper.  The creekbed that the dirt track followed was gray and rocky, the gravel-sized stones packed so tightly that it resembled a road.  The scene wasn’t colorful, but with dusk approaching it held an austere appeal.  Asked for no favors, and granted none.  Simple.

View of the Great Salt Lake from Vindicator Canyon.

Zenas Leonard reports that after exploring the Great Salt Lake’s western boundary, the Walker Expedition traveled “into the most extensive and barren plains I [had] ever seen.”  That would be, most likely, the Bonneville Salt Flats.  Through the flats, Zenas reported, Indians had beaten paths from one spring or water-holding tank to another.  Likely by following one of these trails, the expedition reached a spring on the day they set out into the flats.  The next day, they headed northwest until they reached a north-south running hill about one to three miles wide and covered with salty rocks that the horses licked.

There’s no telling what spring the expedition reached.  But I figured I’d take a look at one that they might have reached – something southeast of a hill that ran north-south and was a couple miles wide.  I dug through my maps.  The “Newfoundland Mountains” fit Zenas’s description of the hill, and they lay a long day’s ride northwest of Craner Spring.  I drove toward Craner Spring.

The dirt track I was driving on wasn’t as smooth as the creekbottom.  It was gouged by ankle-deep ruts and strewn with rocks the size of hiking boots.  The truck lurched through the ruts and heaved over the rocks.  The camper swayed back and forth, sending its spring-loaded couplings into squeaking fits.  With the window down it was like listening to a couple hundred mice hold parliament.  I wasn’t surprised when the road became impassible.  I put my headlamp in my pocket and got out to walk.  I had only about a mile to go.

Shadows already covered the floor of Vindicator Canyon, but I figured I could make it to the canyon head by dark.  Duke and I walked up the creekbed.  The water had sawed into the valley floor, leaving gravelly walls two or three feet high.  In places, big pieces of driftwood attested to the stream’s occasional might.  But with each step it became clearer that, on October 13, 2009, the spring was dry.  Duke and I reached the head of the canyon.  Not a drop of water.

Duke walking up the creekbed.

I don’t know when the spring runs.  Springtime, maybe, when snow melts?  But Walker was here in late summer.  How would he have known which springs ran year-round, and which ones were seasonal?  Did he just get lucky?  Did he follow what appeared to be the most recently-used Indian trails?  I glanced around in the gathering dusk.  Dry grass, dry sagebrush, dead junipers, rocks, dust.  I tried to imagine getting stranded in the Salt Lake Basin at night without water.  And then getting up in the morning and heading west, where I didn’t know whether I’d find water.  US Magnesium’s trail had led me astray.  Maybe the Indian trails worked better for Captain Walker.

It was not a world for the fainthearted.  I walked back to the truck.

Overlooking the Great Salt Lake from a vantage point south of, and above, Vindicator Canyon.